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Toby

Food waste - should I compost?

Food waste is systemic problem that means only two thirds of what's produced at farm gets eaten. The estimated 1.3 MILLION TONNES of food waste globally each year has a massive environmental footprint - in terms of climate change, food waste accounts for 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide - or 10% of the greenhouse gases produced each year.


Whilst much of this is waste in the supply chain, we are all very familiar with consumer waste. Throwing out the mouldy food from the vegetable drawer. Bread ends that don't get eaten. Left-overs or unfinished plates of food that end up wasted. The FAO estimates that we each waste nearly 100kg of food per year.



In many regions of the UK, household collection still does include food waste collection - although the UK government wants to have a much more consistent collection by 2025. But still in many areas of the UK - and in many parts of the world (including the USA) - food waste collection is still limited, as is wider recycling. In part this is due to lack of end points (large scale composting facilities or anaerobic digestors), or inefficiencies that make collection in some regions unviable.


But even where there is food waste collection, we still should be reducing the amount we waste.

1. This starts with buying the right amount of food and freezing what can't be eaten before it goes bad.

2. Cooking in batches drives efficiency if you've planned to eat the left overs ina couple of days time or freezing the excess.

3. Composting at home

4. Buying surplus produce - suppliers who sell you produce that supermarkets have rejected (size and appearance issues) or overproduction or excess import produce, which otherwise goes to waste.


Here, I'll focus on composting in particular, but I'll come back to what we've done regarding surplus produce in another blog.


 

Composting


Composting has lots of benefits:

  1. Compared to sending food waste to landfill, composting avoids potential unmanaged anaerobic breakdown of the organic matter and production of methane - a potent greenhouse gas.

  2. Composting at home gives you quality compost (or at least good soil enricher) for your own garden, helping you start the cycle of growing at home.

  3. My kids LOVE composting. Ours is a simple composting bin we've named Betsy (photo below) - super low maintenance, and they help me take out vegetable waste to feed her.

So why are we composting when we have municipal collection? We keep two small composting bins - one for the kerbside collection, and one for Betsy, our trusty composting bin in the garden. Why? For one, we want our own soil enricher / compost for spring and growing. This means we don't need to buy compost - and even better (in case anyone reading still does this) we can avoid any temptation of using peat. (For info on why never to use peat as a gardening supply, please go here). We put food waste that Betsy and her bacteria and worms won't like in the kerbside - peelings from fruits that might have pesticides (banana and orange peels if non-organic), meat scraps (attract foxes and vermin), but most other things go to the garden.


A few tips on composting from us are (so far - definitely not experts yet) - go half nitrogenous food waste, and half carbon-rich stock (leaves, we use brown card chips from all the boxes that come with home deliveries) - this gives more soil structure and prevents the compost heap going smelly and not getting enough air in it. I've turned the current pile twice in the last six months, and its looking really healthy with lots of worms and insects. More tips from some proper experts here. Come spring, fingers crossed our experimentation will yield results. Just for reference, we've a small urban garden, with a limited veggie patch, but using a 300l bin (probably a bit larger than we need) at half capacity. Unobtrusively hidden at the side of the garden.


Do let us know if you've got some composting tips.




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